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In a pickle - i7 4970k vs i5 6600k

Geo-Gamer

Geo-Gamer

Geo-Gamer

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Joined
21 Aug 2010
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904
Hey guys,

was wondering if some of you could share a few thoughts....

I currently have a i7 4970k and i worked out for another extra £50 (after selling items) i can upgrade to ddr 4 ram 16gb but with my budget being a student and all i will have to get an i5 6600k which is next generation to my current chip.

I only use my pc for gaming such as Witcher 3, bf4, wow and soon to come bf1.

Question is for a £50 difference i really want to upgrade to 1151 and ddr4 but im worried about the i7 4970k to i5 6600k? If the difference is identical in gaming performance i dont mind...

Thanks in advance.
 
It might be a small upgrade or a (slightly larger) downgrade depending on the game, overclocks, etc.

I wouldn't do it just for the faff though tbh.
 
Two games the op mentions, (bf4 and bf1) will run slightly better on the 4790k. Bf3/4 both make use of extra cores/threads so id expect bf1 to be the same.
 
As mentioned it's going backwards. A 4790k is still one of the best gaming chips available, Aren't we expecting the additional threads to come into play more with the newer api's? That's what I'm expecting.
 
nashathedog said:
As mentioned it's going backwards. A 4790k is still one of the best gaming chips available, Aren't we expecting the additional threads to come into play more with the newer api's? That's what I'm expecting.
Click to expand...

The effect of hyperthreading has always been unpredictable. Basically it's useful to smooth out stalls from other components, especially I/O. See this for a much more technical explanation http://stackoverflow.com/a/22336602

For high performance codes, i.e. when you're pretty sure to be CPU or memory limited, it usually slows things down. The common exception is Cinebench, which some say might be due to the overheads in decomposing the workload being smoothed out by using extra threads. (See https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/Hyper-Threading-may-be-Killing-your-Parallel-Performance-578/)

In games it's still quite rare for hyperthreading to improve performance, simply because the GPU is usually the bottleneck. The anandtech bench chart for 6600K vs 6700K is very good in that it shows averages, minimums, and some '% frames over 16 ms' for several games on several GPUs with and without multi-GPU:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1544?vs=1543

Even bearing in mind the i7 is 500 MHz faster than the i5 in this case, there are only a couple of benchmarks that show the i7 offering a small improvement (IMO). These are

Shadow of Mordor on 2x MSI R9 290X Gaming LE 4GB ($380) [Minimum FPS]

and maybe

Grand Theft Auto V on ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB ($560) [Under 60 FPS]

i.e. the minimums with crossfire are better on the i7, and the frame times are more consistent with a 980 on the i7.

If I were buying today I wouldn't buy an i7 over an i5, the premium is too large considering the performance difference, and I don't think it's likely to widen soon.
 
Brazo said:
Why ddr4?

What does it do in gaming that ddr3 doesn't?
Click to expand...

Not much although the 6700k sometimes show a bigger lead over the 4790k than expected and some put this down to the ram speed improvements, When Bf4 released Corsair were doing a promotion showing how 2400mhz ram gave roughly a 5 fps increase over 1600mhz ram in otherwise identical systems, Fast DDR4 could be having a similar effect when compared to DDR3. Just guesses but food for thought.
 
nashathedog said:
Not much although the 6700k sometimes show a bigger lead over the 4790k than expected and some put this down to the ram speed improvements, When Bf4 released Corsair were doing a promotion showing how 2400mhz ram gave roughly a 5 fps increase over 1600mhz ram in otherwise identical systems, Fast DDR4 could be having a similar effect when compared to DDR3. Just guesses but food for thought.
Click to expand...

Was this with 2 graphic cards though?

You can get 2400 ddr3 ram and it clocks at cl10, far quicker than most ddr4 ram:D

I say 'far', technically it's faster but I do not notice a difference between my tridents and my non branded 1600mhz!
 
It may of been 2 cards, I don't remember but I would have thought that is something I would have noted so I'm guessing not, I'll try to find the promotion.

Googling found this which isn't the promotional add I originally saw but I presume it is the same data it used so yes it was sli, It would have been a lot more relevant if single card figures were also used seeing as 99% of gamers do not run sli but maybe it hardly made any difference with one gpu. http://www.corsair.com/en/blog/2013/october/battlefield-4-loves-high-speed-memory
 
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nashathedog said:
Aren't the new api's expected to gradually change this though?
Click to expand...

Depends entirely on the game.

The best case for hyperthreading in games would be if more threads can be used to overlap computation (but there's not much of this in games anyway) and other high-latency tasks (e.g. reading a texture from a HDD).

The bigger improvement from the new APIs is reducing the CPU overhead in the API itself. This gives you an improvement in performance with or without hyperthreading.
 
I don't understand these moves at all... I'm still running a Sandybridge i7. A 5GHz 2700K.

I'm yet to be convinced that ill see much difference in upgrading to a brand new i7.
 
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